Teenagers at NewVic were taught how to stop friends bleeding to death from a knife wound.
Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Suzanne Palka is in the business of saving lives. In a crowded hall of an east London college, she is demonstrating to teenagers how to stop their friends bleeding to death from a knife wound. “The key message is, if someone is stabbed, you need to apply direct pressure to the wound. It’s very effective. It buys time for the ambulance to get through and it saves lives.”

Palka is a youth education co-ordinator at the British Red Cross and one of a range of experts who have been brought into Newham sixth form college (NewVic) for a day of Life Not Knife workshops designed to educate students on how to protect themselves at a time of growing knife crime. It is the event’s tenth year, but the recent rise in knife crime has given it a new urgency.

“I’ve had a lot of people ask me today: why?” says Palka of the increase in stabbings. “I don’t have the answers. But I can show them simple first aid and it can save lives. They’re frightened to help. But the quicker they act, the greater the likelihood of that person’s survival. It’s about confidence.”

At the other end of the hall, a group of students are getting self-defence training from a local karate academy. They practise using their forearms to block and a wristlock to disarm. Elsewhere in the hall there are trauma staff from the Royal London Hospital in nearby Whitechapel who treat the injuries caused by knife crime, and the charity workers who join them on the wards to try to rebuild the lives of those affected.

Michael Carver is a violence reduction nurse at the Royal. He’s brought some of the tools he and his colleagues use to save the lives of stabbing victims. There’s a Gigli saw to cut through the sternum to provide emergency access to the heart; there’s an intraosseous needle, which drills into the bone to enable the delivery of drugs and fluids if vascular access is impossible after major blood loss, and there’s a stoma bag, used to collect faeces after a knife wound in the intestines. The students handle them with avid curiosity.

“Having seen so much of it, I see the humanity behind these injuries every single day,” says Carver. “Statistics can dehumanise it, but they are all individuals with their own trials and tribulations.” The young men who strut around with their chests puffed out are often the ones in tears on the wards where no one can see them.

“We are getting much, much better at saving lives,” says Carver. But they don’t always succeed, and it’s hard when someone has to break the news to a desperate mother that her 15-year-old son has died. “It’s demoralising and draining when you’ve worked a really long time on someone and they don’t come through.”

Last year Newham had the highest murder rate in the capital. As the NewVic event got under way on Wednesday, figures from the Ministry of Justice provided a stark reminder of the scale of the problem. Last year the criminal justice system dealt with 21,484 knife and offensive weapon offences: the highest number since 2009.

Many students are frightened. “When you are out there, you have that feeling that anything can happen any time. You don’t feel safe,” said 17-year-old Anwar Said. Fellow student Ricardo Guerra, 16, recently arrived in the UK from Caracas in Venezuela and was shocked by the level of knife crime in London. “A friend of mine was going to his house and a group of three people with knives attacked him and stole his wallet. I come from Caracas, the second most dangerous place in the world. I thought London was safe, but I started feeling a little bit less safe.”

Sanjeeva Camillus is from the St Giles Trust, which works in the Royal London’s major trauma centre, supporting young people admitted as victims of knife and gun crime. He is currently working with a young man blinded after being shot in the face; he has two young people who have had stoma bags fitted for the last two years after suffering knife wounds and his youngest client so far was 12. “I’m here to show there are consequences to carrying a knife,” Camillus said.